Spinoza: America’s Founding Grandfather

Jul04

American born Parker Lancaster delves into the depths of what the notion of freedom and Independence Day truly stands for and how he will be taking a page out of Spinoza's book this year...(excuse the pun).

If you ask most Americans, we will tell you we love
freedom. We fetishize it, we worship at its altar. It is our national pastime,
our anthem, our official national bird. Practically every day in the USA is treated
as Independence Day, but July 4th is a special day. The smell of
gasoline, gunpowder, and charred sausages linger in the air while we celebrate
freedom by shotgunning beers, polishing off handles of rotgut whiskey, lighting
illegal fireworks in the desert, starting brushfires, flocking to stadiums by
the thousands to watch the sky explode, and getting into all manner of
shenanigans, ballyhoo, monkeyshines, and scofflawery.

However, the freedom that’s popularly associated with
July 4th is, in my view, mostly nominal, hypocritical, and
predicated upon ignorance of American history. We celebrate our history of liberty
from British tyranny (and taxes), our willingness to fight for our rights, our
remarkable Bill of Rights, and its guarantees of free speech, a free press,
freedom of religion, and due process for all. We also deify our country as a
shining city on a hill as we claim American exceptionalism and status as God’s
final chosen people, the messengers and arbiters of truth and justice around
the world. While there are freedoms, triumphs, and wonderful moments and people
in American history to celebrate, there are just as many things we’d much
rather forget.

This year, I will do my patriotic duty and dissent
from these hollow and farcical proceedings. July 4th is, more than
anything, a holiday of national amnesia. And who could blame us? Our history is
one full of regrets. Regrets like slavery, genocide, lynch mobs, segregation,
preemptive wars for profit, nuclear war, double tap drone strikes, illegal
prisons and rendition sites, toppling democracy abroad to install dictatorial
and fundamentalist theocratic regimes friendly to corporate interests,
crippling debt and wealth disparity, disastrous laissez faire capitalism in
banking and fossil fuels, a rampant global surveillance state, legalized
bribery of elected officials, prosecution of whistleblowers, the largest prison
population on the planet, marriage and gender discrimination, and so on, and so
forth.

No wonder so many of us treat Independence Day as a
blackout-drunk holiday. The “freedom” we are led by our pastors and politicians
to idolize on Independence Day is a fiction, a shadow of what we imagine it to
be, and we seem to delight in denying it to each other and even to ourselves,
generation after generation. Those who put on the biggest show of patriotism,
it seems, are the most eager to make scapegoats of, denigrate, and deport
religious minorities and refugees, curtail personal liberties in the name of
security, and blame their no-longer-beloved free press at every turn for their
own incompetence and failings.

This July 4th,
I’m celebrating a different kind of freedom, one more fundamental and lasting
than any one man, country, or coveted government document. It will be my
holiday for the liberation of the mind from ancient, outdated, and malignant
modes of thought, and for the legacy of the historical champion of that
liberation, Benedict Spinoza.

Spinoza was a
peaceful radical, gentleman’s gentleman, freethinker, genius, and a reviled and
notoriously unapologetic heretic. A man after my own heart. He was the first
philosopher in the world to marry rigorous religious skepticism to a political
theory of a democratic state. He invented the notion of secular democracy in
his “Theological-Political Treatise”. If Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, et al, are
America’s Founding Fathers, then surely Benedict Spinoza must be numbered
chiefly among America’s Founding Grandfathers. History is decidedly on
Spinoza’s side. It has been well-demonstrated, in Spinoza’s time and our own,
that tolerant secular democracies (in the case of the United States, a
democratic republic) or constitutional monarchies that essentially operate
under the same democratic framework, are the only proven and sustainable model
for a lasting, peaceful, just, and prosperous state. Or at least the most
peaceful, just, and prosperous form of government yet devised. It would be a
grave mistake to pretend that Spinoza was a perfect man free of his own
prejudices, that his complete corpus is flawless, or that the political state
he advocated for is, or could ever be, a utopia or panacea for the moral
failings and ills of mankind. But all options considered, it’s certainly the
least awful form of a society we’ve discovered to date.

Spinoza’s
“Ethics” was radical in its own way. A treatise far more about human psychology
and emotions than religion or theology, and structured as a complex web of
propositions and axioms akin to a set of foundational mathematical proofs, it
is remarkable for its complete independence from Scripture. There is one
citation of Ecclesiastes, several of the Apostles’ names are used (probably
with a little irony) as ordinary stand-in characters wholly unrelated to their
Biblical counterparts, and a total of one paragraph is given to discussion of
Adam and Eve, Christ, and the Patriarchs, and even this prefaced by the
skeptical introduction, “We are told…” All of the few references to Scripture
in the Ethics are only examples to illustrate a point, and Spinoza never uses the
circular reasoning of the inerrant word of God as justification for
philosophical claims. Inconsequential religious references and a handful of
brief citations of Ovid and Cicero aside, the Ethics is an utterly
self-contained work.

In Spinoza’s
time, church and state were completely integrated virtually everywhere, in
every nation, every walk of life, university, and most fields of study. Scholasticism
had tethered philosophy to theology with an iron chain. The Scholastics had a
well-worn adage, “philosophia ancilla
theologiae.” “Philosophy is the chambermaid of theology.” This was not a
reversible schema. But the Ethics is no handmaiden, and it represented a
resounding break from longstanding philosophical tradition. Spinoza litters the
Ethics with references to God and His perfection, but no one would mistake this
for a religious text. Spinoza’s God, of course, is far from orthodox. He (or
she, or it) and nature itself are one and the same. His conception of God has
no throne, no corporeal form, no Commandments, prophets, temple, holy book, or
church. His universe is a rational one, in which miracles and the supernatural
are not possible.

Spinoza’s unspeakably evil, blasphemous, and monstrous
prescription for how to love and serve God, for a person of any faith, is
simply to live with justice and charity toward others. The following items are therefore
superfluous in Spinoza’s philosophy to leading a happy, ethical, and righteous
life: dusty tomes, Bronze Age wisdom, obscure rites, bizarre rituals, crusades
to take and take back and retake and retake back holy lands one final, final time….again, chosen peoples, ethnic cleansing, final solutions, suicide
bombings, iconoclastic furies, honor killings, vaguely sinister-sounding incantations
in dead and/or manufactured tongues, tithes, fancy robes, miscellaneous fancy
accoutrement, tabernacles, relics, headgear, specified hairstyles and facial
and body hair grooming regimens, rosaries, idols, ceremonial daggers, special
prayer rugs, particular things to say during prayer, particular cardinal
directions to face during prayer, particular numbers of prayers per day,
compulsory prayer in schools, prayer, pilgrimages, exorcisms, witch hunts,
dancing bans, music bans, book bans, book burnings, designated times for sexual
intercourse, appropriate positions for sexual intercourse, acceptable partners
for sexual intercourse, forbidden erogenous zones during sexual intercourse, auditing
sessions, patron saint car fresheners, genital mutilation or manipulation of
any noodly appendages, holy liquids, holy foodstuffs (gefilte fish is particularly forbidden, though an
exception must surely made for matzo ball soup), and much, much more.

Naturally, the Amsterdam
congregation to which Spinoza belonged had no choice but to excommunicate him
forever, and to write his herem with such eager vitriol that one can’t help but
imagine the authors licking their lips and foaming at the mouth. Amusingly, the
herem reads, in part, “all the curses that are written in this book shall lie
upon him, and the Lord shall blot out his name from under heaven.” Oops. Maybe
the Lord decided to just smudge his name, or lightly scribble over it instead. Spinoza
made no attempt at formal amends for his grievous sins and heresies. He never
reverted to Judaism, converted to any other religion, or apologized for his
beliefs. He spent the remainder of his life as a humble pensioner, lens grinder,
and correspondent with many of the great scientific and philosophical minds of
his day, and occasionally published his treatises. He decided against
publishing his Ethics in his lifetime, directing close friends only after his
death to ship his writing desk, the manuscript locked inside, unmarked to his
publisher. It is equally ironic and horrifying that the only surviving
manuscript of the Ethics in the world resides in the Vatican Library. The same
Vatican that prohibited every Catholic from reading any of Spinoza’s works for
nearly 300 years.

It is a tragedy and a blight on history that Spinoza
was so forcefully expelled from and ostracized by his own community, but what
revolution was ever won without pain? Would the Ethics or the treatises ever
have been written had Spinoza not first incurred the wrath of his religion, his
peers, even his own family, simply for espousing beliefs that, in retrospect,
are perfectly reasonable and necessary for a modern world? Spinoza’s work shows
the vital importance of reading things that “can't” be read, asking questions
that are not allowed to be asked and demanding answers, and breaking the status
quo in half, if need be.

If the unfalsifiable whisperings, revelations,
divinations and pronouncements of the ancient prophets, apostles, messiahs, and
acolytes of the world are true, and if Spinoza the heretic is indeed in hell,
as his critics gloated upon his death, then perhaps my own stubborn insistence
on reason and skepticism on matters political and religious dictate that I will
join him there in due course. If so, I think we’ll have an awful lot of good
conversation and good company (and a little bit of bad), and I’ll be sure to
bring plenty of hot dogs, Colman’s mustard, fireworks and beer. While I’m at
it, I’ll bring along my copy of Terminator 2. Thinking of Spinoza this July 4th,
I can’t help but be reminded of the iconic line from the film. “No fate but
what we make for ourselves.” If we truly want to live up to and live with the
ideals of freedom, truth and justice in our world, we have to seek out the
wisdom of bold visionaries and actively and relentlessly pursue those ideals
ourselves, both as individuals and as a body politic. It will be difficult, and
nothing and no one can destine it for us or gift it to us on a silver platter. As
the philosopher said, all noble things are as difficult as they are rare. And
so I bid my fellow Americans and fellow freethinkers everywhere a happy
Independence Day.